Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 10-276478 discloses an apparatus controlling household appliances in accordance with the information supplied from an outside communication network. This laid-open application describes a household appliances control apparatus controlling various electrical appliances at home in which each electrical appliance takes in control information of the appliance from a host computer of a home page through a remote controller, a server for the household appliance control and the Internet, and each appliance attains its function in accordance with the control information.
This laid-open application describes an example in which the control information is cooking information related to cooking. The example, however, is not very practical, as specific procedure of how to obtain the cooking information desired by the user from a home page, how to supply the information to a microwave oven as the electrical appliance and how the process for heating and cooking takes process in the microwave oven are not at all described.
Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2-106620 discloses a technique in which heating mode of a microwave oven is controlled in accordance with a prescribed heating control pattern data. The heating pattern data applied in the laid-open application is set independently for each recipe. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare heating pattern data different for every type of recipes that can be heated and cooked. In view of the limitation of memory capacity, this approach is not practical.